A buddy and I are trying to get a ubuntu live usb drive to boot. Boots on our desktops and our laptops, but the surface will see it and try to boot off of it during reboot (telling by light activity on drive).

We turned off secure boot and security options. It shows the Drive under "Boot from CD,USB,etc", ill pick it, the surface reboots, we see activity on the flash drive, a slight pause where it looks like its trying, then boots into 8.

Also, he has light bleed. 2 points at the bottom, and 1 at top. Anyone else notice this? Easiest way to tell is when the surface reboots and the WHOLE background is solid black.

I've no idea about the surface pro architecture but are you using the right ISO type, i.e. EFI bootloader ISO if it's an EFI system?

Yes made sure of that. Tested by booting it on our UEFI desktops with asus/gigabyte boards and my macbook. Everytime it booted fine. I also see the efi files in the usb root dir. So i know its built correctly.

Make sure drive is formatted FAT32. Had same problem with mine - after changing to FAT32, worked perfectly. For me to resolve issues, I could not use any utilities to build the USB drive. Mount ISO image, format USB thumb drive FAT32, copy over contents of ISO image.

Make sure drive is formatted FAT32. Had same problem with mine - after changing to FAT32, worked perfectly. For me to resolve issues, I could not use any utilities to build the USB drive. Mount ISO image, format USB thumb drive FAT32, copy over contents of ISO image.

Hey thanks for the reply. What flavor did you end up installing.

As far as copying the contents how did you copy them. Like copy & paste, dd, etc.

won't the fact that it requires a secure bootloader stop you from using anything other than windows on it... and even then, only the installed version that it comes with?

Wrong. Surface Pro ships with secure boot enabled. But it can be turned off in the BIOS settings, according to Microsoft. How to access those BIOS settings has yet to be seen since people just got their hands on the Surface Pro so Google cannot help with finding anything on accessing the BIOS settings. I bet the manual or Microsoft has some information on this.

I believe a way to access BIOS settings is by going to PC Settings, then General, then Advanced Startup. Somewhere in those menus allows you to access firmware settings. From there you can turn off Secure Boot. But I have not got my Surface Pro to test that out yet. It should work.

And i've had trouble in the past where some computers don't read boot loaders correctly, I've had to use alternative boot systems on USB keys to make them go. YUMI is a good alernative if you'd like to try that?

@Sionic Ion: What you said* is correct. Ill make a tutorial hopefully tomorrow. Tonight as soon as I get home I'm not going to bed till I figure this out. So ill document everything for my sake and ill post it here.

@Raa: ill try that if B.Wolkens suggestion doesn't work then I was going to try grub 2 with efi support but I forgot all about Yumi actually sounds like a better idea

And i've had trouble in the past where some computers don't read boot loaders correctly, I've had to use alternative boot systems on USB keys to make them go. YUMI is a good alernative if you'd like to try that?

So status is, ubuntu is installed, now wont boot. Surface gets stuck at grub, but it goes into grub rescue and I cant do anything in rescue.

Cant boot of live installation and install boot-repair cause surface's wifi doesnt get noticed. Ill try live booting the usb key on my desktop hopefully I have better luck at detecting a network and being able to install boot-repair and run it to see if that fixes it.

So status is, ubuntu is installed, now wont boot. Surface gets stuck at grub, but it goes into grub rescue and I cant do anything in rescue.

Cant boot of live installation and install boot-repair cause surface's wifi doesnt get noticed. Ill try live booting the usb key on my desktop hopefully I have better luck at detecting a network and being able to install boot-repair and run it to see if that fixes it.

if you have an windows install disk/iso/usb, I'd repair the windows boot loader then use EasyBCD to add linux to the windows boot loader

that way if you have problems you will know it won't completely break your boot loader